


Breathe Fire

by angeltrap



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Asthma, Asthmatic Dean, Broken Bones, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-07-15
Packaged: 2018-07-24 03:22:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7491444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeltrap/pseuds/angeltrap
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I don't have asthma.” He just got like this when he spent too much time around massive amounts of dust, or cats, or when he was sick, or every spring when there was pollen everywhere, but that was just allergies, not asthma.</p><p>Written in July 2014. Previously published on LiveJournal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Breathe Fire

**Title:** Breathe Fire

 **Author:** angeltrap

 **Series:** Supernatural

 **Genre:** gen, hurt-comfort

 **Characters:** Dean, Sam, OFC

 **Warnings:** Asthma, broken bones, completely unprofessional medical vocabulary

 **Word count** **:** 3000

**Summary:** _“I don't have asthma.” He just got like this when he spent too much time around massive amounts of dust, or cats, or when he was sick, or every spring when there was pollen everywhere, but that was just allergies, not asthma._

**Comments** **:** Posted on LJ in July 2014.

Would you believe I wrote half of this on my cell-phone? On. My. Cell-phone. In the bus. My fanfic-fu has reached new levels.

And then the important bit: I do have asthma, but I'm not all that familiar with related vocabulary (especially in English) or how it actually works. Then again, the Dean in this story knows even less, so... :D I don't know how widely asthma was recognized and treated in the US around Dean's childhood, but I imagine it wasn't very widely, and I also imagine that John's nomadic lifestyle, lack of money and insurances and general johnwinchesterness would have kept Dean from ever being diagnosed in his youth in any case. Dean, I supposed, would have just thought it was somehow his fault and worked all the more harder to keep up with his father. (Which is only possible because I gave him a relatively mild version of asthma, mind you. An untreated asthma can be really dangerous, so if you have asthma, don't be a Winchester. See a doctor.)

 

****

 

**Breathe Fire**

 

 

When Dean came to, it was with a mighty gasp caused by two tiny fingers squeezing his nose shut.

 

“Well, finally!” a young, impatient voice said, and the little fingers of doom retreated. “I've been calling and shaking and pinching you for _hours_!”

 

Dean blinked his eyes open, fighting to get his bearings, hands patting the ground around him for a possible weapon - his right hand had already gone for the knife in his pocket and found it missing, and the fact that he was lying on his back and nothing was poking him in the lower back told him that his gun wasn't there, tucked under the waist of his jeans, either. His cell was gone, too.

 

He was in a dark space with a musty smell to it - the ground under him was a little too even to be natural, so a man-made place, then, maybe a basement, though there was enough dirt and soil to have initially fooled him. The air was thick with dust. His head felt like it was about to split into two, his left ankle was sending messages of a dull pain to his brain when it could get through, and his chest felt tight; he cleared his throat and found himself coughing his lungs out, except that even coughing was suddenly difficult because he couldn't seem to be able to inhale enough air to cough it out.

 

_Aw, shit. Not again._

 

“Here”, the young voice said, and something plastic was thrust against his mouth, making him sputter and slap the thing away to get it from blocking his airways.

 

“Hey!” came the instant, annoyed reply. “That wasn't nice. I was just trying to help!”

 

“What,” Dean gasped, one hand against his heaving chest, “what was it? And who are you?”

 

He had a feeling that he was supposed to know who the kid was, though. In fact, he was pretty sure he'd probably been looking for this child – or at least _a_ child – when... whatever had landed him here had happened.

 

The kid heaved a dramatic, long-suffering sigh. “It's medicine, stupid! Men!” she - Dean was now pretty sure that it was a she - added with the kind of gusto and vehemence that suggested she was imitating someone much older.

 

The image of a woman's face, worried but determined, flashed in Dean's mind. He was looking for someone's daughter. He'd _found_ someone's daughter.

 

“I don't,” _hack, hack, wheeze_ , “need any medicine, okay?” His breath was whistling painfully in and out, cheerfully defying everything he said. “And don't call people stupid.”

 

But breathing was getting harder by the moment, and he could feel the beginnings of a panic attack.

 

“You're wheezing like my old grandpa after a pipe!” The kid snorted - another expression that seemed copied from someone else. The voice was young, very young, probably too young to know what a pipe was or at least what it did to your lungs. “You gotta take this so you can breathe. I know, I have asthma, too.”

 

Oh. _Oh_.

 

Dean hesitated. His breath had an audible rasp and the air seemed to never reach his lungs all the way. It wasn't like he had asthma (... diagnosed...) but... It couldn't hurt to try, right? Maybe it'd help him breathe anyway.

 

“How's it work?”

 

“You don't know?” He heard a soft click. “Here, I loaded it for you. Now blow.”

 

“Blow?” Dean gasped between coughs. He wasn't exactly an expert, but he was pretty sure that asthma medicine was supposed to be inhaled – hence the term _inhaler_ , he figured – not exhaled.

 

The girl heaved another mighty sigh, like she was trying to teach a particularly dumb dog tricks and was _this close_ to giving up. “Bad air out, good air in?” she suggested in a snippy tone that sounded so much like Sam that it was ridiculous.

 

Right. Okay. Now if he only had any air left to blow out...

 

“Okay, okay.” He held out his hand. Asthma or not, he was ready to give it a try, because no matter how he tried, the air seemed to stop somewhere in his throat before coming out again, and his breath was already coming in short, panicked gasps.

 

Something round and plastic was placed on his hand and turned into the correct position. Dean frowned; it wasn't the vaguely hook-shaped thing he'd expected, having seen people use those before, but more of a... disk. The girl moved his thumb to what was apparently a mouthpiece; the plastic felt different, there.

 

“Okay, so now you need to blow like it's your birthday and there's lots of candles, and then you put this part to your mouth and breathe real deep. And _then_ ,” she continued, holding Dean's hand when he started to raise it to his mouth, “you need to _hold your breath_. So it doesn't run away before it can help.”

 

Black spots and images of running inhalers swimming in his vision, Dean nodded, wheezed out a pathetic puff of breath, put the thing against his lips or at least in the corner of his mouth (hey, it was dark and he was blacking out any moment now) and inhaled as deep as his malfunctioning lungs could manage, which wasn't a lot. A weird sensation of something powdery and not exactly pleasant-tasting filled his mouth, and he snapped his lips shut and held his breath, hoping that some of the medicine had actually made it past his mouth and into his lungs.

 

“Good job!” the girl cheered him on. “You can take two 'cause you sound pretty bad.”

 

Dean nodded blindly, still lightheaded and dizzy, but his breath wasn't whistling as long as he was holding his breath, and maybe a second dose wasn't such a bad idea, just in case the first one was splattered all over his tongue. She took the inhalator from him, he heard another soft click, and then it was back in his hand and it was time for rinse-and-repeat. This time, he thought he could actually feel some of the medicine getting stuck in his throat instead of his mouth.

 

“Now?” he rasped out as he handed the inhaler back to the girl.

 

“We wait,” she replied. “Why didn't you know how to use it? Mom says I have to always carry it with me 'cause my asthma's so bad, so why don't you?”

 

“I don't have asthma.” He just got like this when he spent too much time around massive amounts of dust, or cats, or when he was sick, or every spring when there was pollen everywhere, but that was just allergies, not asthma. Allergies that were easy enough to treat.

 

“Skittles,” she scoffed; Dean blinked, and then decided that based on the tone, this was her version of _bullshit_. “I tried to say I didn't have asthma either because everyone was laughing at me, but then I fainted at school because I didn't have my medicine with me and Mom was so mad she looked like the Hulk, and now I know that it's nothing to be ashamed of, and Jimmy Anderson is stupid and can go eat dog poo if he doesn't get that.”

 

Dean grinned a little as he tried to imagine the woman he had met just yesterday telling her daughter that bullies were stupid and could go eat dog poo. It wasn't at all difficult. She'd been the spunky kind, the kind that would raise her daughter tough and witty and awesome, the kind that wouldn't bat her eye at people looking sideways at her and her little girl for making it alone in the world.

 

And maybe it was the medicine helping and maybe it wasn't, but suddenly the fragmented pieces of his memory clicked together into a full picture. He'd been looking for that woman's seven-year-old daughter, nosing around an abandoned house based on Sam's research, when someone had struck him from behind; he'd hurt his ankle during the struggle, so that explained the dull, thudding pain that had been mostly blocked out by the panic of not being able to breathe and was now rearing its ugly head.

 

“Tricia Barrow,” he said. “Are you Tricia Barrow?”

 

She was silent, immediately suspicious. “I'm not supposed to tell my name to strangers.”

 

“You're supposed to lend them your medication?”

 

“Well, if you're too stupid to carry your own!”

 

“I don't _have_ any, okay? I don't have asthma.”

 

“Then why'd you stop wheezing?”

 

Dean's train of thought skidded to a halt. He _wasn't_ wheezing. He wasn't feeling particularly lightheaded or on the edge of a panic attack, either. His chest still hurt a little, and the air still didn't seem to go all the way to his lungs, but he could _breathe_.

 

“Oh,” he said.

 

“You're welcome,” Tricia said, smug as they come. “You're lucky I was here to save you!”

 

“Actually, I'm here to save you,” Dean muttered. “Not one of my brightest moments, to be honest.”

 

“No,” Tricia agreed. “But the guy _was_ very big,” she added amiably in his defense.

 

“I'm big”, Dean protested. Also, wait a minute – “And what _guy_? I thought –” And he stopped there, because _I thought it was a werewolf_ probably wasn't going to win Tricia's trust and respect. After all, werewolves could look like humans when they wanted to. “... Never mind. Look, my name's Dean and I'm a friend of your mom's, so when you went missing, me and my little brother wanted to help her search for you.”

 

“My mom doesn't have any friends named Dean.”

 

“Well, I'm a new friend, okay?” Dean sighed, bracing himself against the pain and beginning to get to his feet.

 

Or trying to, because his left ankle heartily disagreed.

 

“That was a very ugly word,” Tricia admonished him after he'd fallen back to his ass with a gasped swearword. Dean glared in her general direction and gritted his teeth against the sharp pain that was radiating from his ankle. He'd barely even noticed it earlier, so he'd assumed it was just a small sprain, nothing he couldn't handle in order to get them out of here, but that... well, that felt like a broken bone.

 

“Well, _excuse me_ , princess, but my ankle's hurt,” he forced out as he tried to ease himself into a better position, with his back against the wall and his left leg stretched out in as painless a way as possible, “and I guess we're not getting anywhere on our own.”

 

“ _And_ we're locked in,” she supplied, annoyingly nonchalant. “You could've asked before trying to stand on a hurt leg. I've been here for _ever_ , so I've searched the place at least _ten_ times. There's only one door and it's locked and there's no light. I've got my backbag with me but he took my phone. I bit him.”

 

Despite his pain and frustration, Dean had to smirk at that. _7-year-old girl bites werewolf_ , he imagined the headlines saying. “Didn't he get mad?”

 

“Well, yeah, and he said some awful things and shook me, but I wasn't scared.” She sounded like she was puffing up her chest. “I almost was, but then I remembered that I'm a dragon and dragons don't get scared.”

 

“So that's why you're not scared of me, either?” Dean asked, making conversation to make the time pass. He wasn't sure how long he'd been unconscious, but Sam was bound to be searching for him soon. Dean was pretty sure their phones were already off and probably destroyed, but Sam knew where he'd gone, so eventually he'd have to get worried and come investigate, right? He just had to hope that his brother wouldn't soon be locked in with them. “Because you're a dragon?”

 

“Mm-hm. And because you're one too.” She paused. “I don't think anyone with asthma could be evil.”

 

“I don't have...” Dean started, then shook his head and raised his hands. “Whatever. How does that make me a dragon, though?”

 

“You really don't know anything, do you?” she asked in a pitying voice. “It's in the book. Here, I have it in my bag...”

 

He heard her dig through her backbag, and then a slim children's book was pressed into his hands. “What is it?”

 

“They give that book to all the kids who have asthma,” she said. “It's about a little dragon who's bullied by other dragons because he can't breathe fire. He's really sad, but then a doctor dragon tells him that he just has asthma and gives him medicine, and then he can take part in the fire-breathing competition as well. I keep it with me to remind myself that I don't care what Jimmy Anderson or anyone else says, I'm still a dragon and I can breathe fire, too, if I take my medicine. I'm not weak just because I have asthma, I can scream just as loud and run just as fast and become a ballerina or an opera singer or a superhero if I want to, and there's nothing embarrassing about having to carry my medicine everywhere I go.”

 

The entire story came out in a rush, practically in one breath, like she'd been wanting to say it for a long time, and then she took a deep breath as if to calm herself down.

 

Dean stared at the dark shape of the girl for a long moment. What if he _did_ have asthma?

 

And _so what_ if he did have it?

 

Was he seriously going to be too chicken to admit something this girl was owning up to like a badass? He'd been a Jimmy Anderson and he'd been raised by a Jimmy Anderson, but the world had changed around him and his dad was gone and Sam was too damn educated to call him weak for having asthma, and maybe it was time to be a dragon.

 

“You know where I could get some of that medicine myself?”

 

\---

 

“So... asthma.”

 

Sam was driving, but he kept glancing at the plastic bag in Dean's lap. It contained painkillers for his ankle – now in a cast and sending mild shocks of pain up his leg whenever they hit a bump in the road – prescribed by a doctor, but also several packages of asthma medicine. Laura Barrow was a pharmacist, and after hearing her daughter's story, she'd seen them off with not only a discount of the prescription meds but also a bag of two types of dry powder disk inhalers she was going to report missing in a few days. One was supposed to be taken regularly to control and prevent further problems, while the other – similar to the one Tricia carried in her bag – was a quick-relief inhaler meant to be used when an asthma attack was already happening.

 

“I know you can't exactly go to a doctor and have two-week-long tests done to see if you have asthma, but it sure as hell sounds like it, though luckily not very severe. And, well, if this is how I can thank you for bringing my little girl back whole and happy...” she'd said, and threatened to tip the police on their location when Dean had tried to refuse. Yep, that was definitely where Tricia got her attitude.

 

An attitude that had gone right out of the window when Sam had barged into the basement, wild-eyed and wild-haired and still wielding the gun he'd shot the werewolf with; the fearless little dragon had taken one look at the great, hulking shape of a madman standing at the top of the basement stairs waving a gun and roaring Dean's name, given an earsplitting shriek and hidden herself behind Dean. Sam was still embarrassed.

 

“I guess,” he said, resolutely keeping his eyes on the road (like Sam should have, he was driving, damn it). Using a false name to get his leg cast at some clinic was easy enough, but he was ready to admit that he wasn't likely to ever get an actual asthma diagnosis or, by extension, a prescription for these things, so yeah, he was grateful. He just hoped she wouldn't get in trouble for this.

 

“ _Always_?” Sam asked, looking and sounding for all the world like Dean had suddenly turned out to have always been a girl.

 

“Got a problem with that?” Dean snapped. So much for Sam being too educated to get his boxers into a twist over this...

 

“No, man, this explains a lot, but...” He shook his head. “You do realize that you've been operating on less-than-normal lung capacity _all your life_? Fighting, running, training, all that? Especially _training._ I mean... Jesus, Dean. You've had to work so much harder than me or Dad for the same results.”

 

Dean stared at the road, but it wasn't the road he was seeing, anymore. It was the asphalt under his feet from when he was fourteen and running extra every day because Sam was younger and smaller and he wasn't supposed to be able to run faster and longer than Dean, but somehow he was, and Dean just kept getting out of breath no matter how he trained.

 

“Huh,” he said, because apparently he'd actually had a legitimate reason to get out of breath.

 

“Huh,” Sam repeated, and he sounded a little stunned and a little awed. “You really _are_ the freaking Batman.”

 

Dean looked at the bag in his lap. Beneath the packages of painkillers and inhalers, there was a small book with bright pictures, a book that Tricia had figured he needed more than she did.

 

He grinned. “No, dude. I'm a freaking dragon.”

 

****

 

A/N: The book with the dragon is based (somewhat loosely) on a booklet I was given when I was little and had to see a doctor about my asthma. I couldn't find it, so the story isn't an exact replica, but that's how I remember the story going, and I remember being in school and thinking, “Dragons can have asthma, too”, whenever PE lessons didn't agree with my lungs.

 


End file.
